Nigel Farage pledged today to condemn vulnerable people to torture and murder by despotic regimes. Those weren’t the words he used, of course. But that’s what Reform’s policy on asylum inevitably entails.
Should the party’s plan ever be implemented, it would be profligate, arbitrary and open to legal challenge. But above all it would be morally abhorrent, because it would cause needless and predictable human suffering purely for the purpose of domestic political posturing.
Farage and Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, announced at a press conference that a Reform government would shut down the asylum system for a full five-year parliamentary term and immediately deport 90,000 applicants who currently have appeal cases. You might suppose from their use of a purported replica of a dinghy as a background prop, and from the party event being held in Kent, that they were concerned with small-boat crossings. In truth, that’s a minor and even tangential part of the message.
Reform’s announced policy is to suspend all asylum tribunals, all legal refugee routes and all resettlement schemes. This would include the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme, under which Ukrainian nationals and their immediate family can find refuge through approved volunteer sponsors (though Ukrainians already settled here would be allowed to remain). In short, British people with the humanitarian impulse to aid and shelter citizens of a nation under assault by Russian imperialism, and to offer their own homes as accommodation, won’t be able to do it any more – owing to political fiat.
The best case you can make for this draconian policy is that it might send a signal to potential asylum seekers that their quest would be in vain, whatever the merits of their case, and that they would therefore be deterred from attempting to reach Britain. It’s not very convincing, even if you disregard the humanitarian aspect.
The last Conservative government tried this approach, with the Illegal Migration Act passed in 2023. It stopped the processing of almost all new asylum claims. The legislation didn’t haven’t the desired effect of stopping the crossings; all it achieved was to create a huge backlog of cases, with would-be migrants being detained indefinitely at public expense.
You have to assume Reform knows and expects the same outcome, given that in May it announced plans to open migrant detention centres. Under this scheme – let’s call it an idée fixe – applicants would be held for up to two weeks before being deported.
Why would you need to build detention centres if the policy itself were a sufficient deterrent? For good measure, Reform proposed that these centres would be built in parts of the country that voted for the Green Party – a flagrant abuse of political power for partisan purposes. The BBC estimated that the cost of construction would be around £12bn, which presumably Reform would conjure up through its deus ex machina – invariably invoked in its economic proposals – of “efficiency savings” in government.
The Tories’ plan, when they were in government, to deal with the problem of irregular arrivals by small boats was the vexed scheme to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda. It never got off the ground, being blocked by the Supreme Court. Even if it had been successfully implemented, the numbers involved would have been in the hundreds. Reform proposes to deport tens of thousands, regardless of their safety.
That is wrong, for reasons that should be obvious but bear spelling out. Reform envisages that countries including Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan will accept refugees whom Britain deports, and will be hit with tariffs if they don’t co-operate. These countries have – to put it mildly – repressive regimes that will exact retribution on those who dissent, and especially on those who demonstrate disaffection by fleeing.
Reform’s approach is one of performative cruelty, apparently intended to outflank their rivals on the right such as Restore. It’s out of step with public opinion. Voters undoubtedly worry about immigration and small-boat crossings, but there’s scant polling evidence that they want to bar all those who seek to escape from conflict and persecution. That is not the British way.